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Mark Greene just needs to grow into it. That’s what his mom tells him at least, though what exactly “it” is tends to vary. His clothes, for example, which hang off his skinny frame no matter what size they are, or his coke bottle glasses, which he thinks make him look like a Martian. Or Washington, or Florida, or Virginia, or wherever it is they’ve moved now, where the other boys that live on the base pick on him for being too small, too smart, and too dumb to know when to shut up.
Mark’s father is usually at work, so it’s Mom that takes the bag of peas out of the freezer whenever he comes home with a black eye and tells him that he’ll be okay. He just needs a little time to adjust and he’ll grow into it.
It’s the first time he ever knows his mom is lying to him. He can’t grow into anything. How can he when they don’t stay anywhere long enough for him to get the shape of it?
He doesn’t say anything though, he knows she’s just trying to help him. And it’s more than his dad does, because she’s doing anything to comfort him at all. His dad comes home to Mark’s black eyes and skinned knees and gives him a pair of boxing gloves and tells him he needs to man up.
Dad is insistent on teaching him how to box because his dad taught him. It’s pretty miserable for everyone involved because, crucially, Mark doesn’t want to learn and their “coaching sessions” usually devolve into his dad yelling at him and Mark snapping back and his mom trying to diffuse the situation by interrupting with offers to get them water or a snack until his dad yells at her too. Mark can usually slip away in his parents’ resulting argument, but that’s a pretty temporary solution to an ongoing problem: his dad thinks he’s a massive pansy.
The funny thing is, Mark hasn’t even really boxed anyone. His mom had drawn the line there, saying that she wasn’t going let Dad put her boy in the ring until he was at least fifteen. “David,” she’d said firmly, drawing the line in a way she so rarely did, “let him grow into it.”
Mark is twelve now, so he still has a little bit of time, but he dreads the day where he’s going to stand in front of another boy with the express purpose of punching each other until someone goes down. His dad says he’s afraid to really get hit, which is stupid because Mark gets hit all the time by boys from school, and that has to be worse than boxing because there’s no ref, which means that no one cares when two of them hold him down while a third hits him. No one even wears gloves!
The answer is much simpler than that: Mark just doesn’t like hurting people. He gets angry sometimes, sure, and those are the few moments where he actually doesn’t mind going a round or two with the punching bag, but hitting another person is different. Of course, Dad doesn’t understand that. He says in a kill or be killed world, it’s better to do the killing, then fumes when Mark tells him real life isn’t war.
His relationship with his dad has never been great, but it’s only getting worse. He picks more and more fights with his dad as the lessons drag on, these loud, knock-down drag-out screaming matches that even Mom can’t interrupt anymore. They say awful things to each other; Dad says he’s ungrateful, that there’s no point trying to teach him anything because he’s too much of a pussy to throw a real punch. One time, Mark calls him a Nazi and gets slapped in the face. He doesn’t swing back.
Once they’ve burnt out, they don’t talk for the rest of the night. Dinner becomes a very quiet affair, even as his mom does her best to make up for their silence. Then the next day they do the whole thing again.
Mark learns to love the nights where his dad isn’t home.
It’s one such night that Mark is doing his homework at the kitchen table while his mom cooks dinner. There’s something relaxing about the repeating thunk-thunk-thunk of her chopping vegetables. Dad is out with his club, so it’s just the two of them until 9.
It’s really peaceful, until his mom lets out this yelp and Mark looks up from his algebra to see her trying to stem the flow of blood from what must be a nasty cut on her finger. “The knife slipped,” she says exasperatedly. “Cripes. Can you get the first aid kit?”
Mark’s off like a shot and back in a blink, watching her anxiously. She's never been good with the sight of blood. The cut is on her right hand, so after a minute of awkwardly attempting to take care of it herself with her left, she gives up and asks him to help her. It’s possibly the most focused he’s been on anything ever. It’s not so deep when he cleans the blood away with an antiseptic wipe, so Mom says to just put a band-aid on it. He does so very carefully, making sure to cover it completely.
When he's done, he looks up from his work to see his mom watching him so fondly it makes him squirm. “What?” he asks defensively.
Her smile doesn’t go away and she puts her non-injured hand on the back of his head, running her fingers through his (too long, according to his dad) hair. “It’s nothing. You were just the same way when you were younger. You’d put band-aids on the other kids when they scraped their knees. I always hoped you were going to grow up to be a doctor. Of course, your father wanted you to follow in his footsteps.”
Mark blows it off in the moment, embarrassed by his mom’s pride in something as stupid as putting on a band-aid, but it sticks with him all through dinner. The thing is, he’s never really thought about what he’d like to do when he grows up. Half because it’s like a million years away and half because he had always assumed that he was going to join the Navy like his dad wanted, even if it was kicking and screaming. It was just another thing he would have to grow into, like a life in the military was the same thing as his cousin’s hand-me-downs.
His mom had said it so easily, like it was nothing. She wanted him to be a doctor. But it couldn’t be that simple, could it?
For the first time, Mark considers that his future might be his own. That just because he had to live under his dad’s rules now doesn’t mean following them forever. He could be a doctor if he wanted. Or an accountant. Or, if he really wanted to piss his dad off, an artist. It’s his life.
His.
So tomorrow and the next day and the next, Mark will run boxing drills with his dad until one of them quits. Maybe, by some miracle, he’ll even get good at it. He’ll put up with it because he doesn’t have much of a choice right now. But someday soon, Mark Green is going to grow into it and whatever "it" ends up being is going to be his call, and his call alone. He can’t wait.